Brands must have a personality, character & spirit: Laeeq Ali, Origami Creative

Origami Creative recently celebrated the completion of 22 years as a company that delivers creative and digital ad services to clients across India and the Middle East. The company has been catering to big names like Accenture, Nitte, FBB, and Wipro and worked to create some great regional brands amidst this rapidly changing market environment.

Laeeq Ali, Origami Creative’s Co-founder & Director, spoke to e4m about how four college friends built a company that helps brands focus on idea-centric stories. Narratives are the crux of a good advertisement and regional-focused marketing is the new future of advertising in India, he said. “What has got us to 22 years is not going to get us another 22 years,” Ali remarked.

Speaking about the company’s focus and how the story behind a brand was important, Ali said: “Idea-centric storytelling is what we largely focus on. And, in today’s context, it is a good mix of the creative narrative as well as performance marketing. In today's context, if you are not delivering these two aspects, it is going to be very challenging. If you are a brand owner or a brand practitioner, if you don't get your narrative, right, which is picked on a strategy and an idea, then performance is a lost game. In the name of performance today, what we're seeing is people are losing track of the narrative. They're just pushing stuff on social media and Google but not necessarily getting the narrative right for the brands. So, from where we started off being an advertising agency, today we are a boutique creative and digital agency.”

With an ever-changing marketing world, Ali mentions the shift in the paradigm of marketing in today’s world. “A lot of focus is on content and will be on content itself going forward. From the idea as well as the story which has to be unique, relevant and meaningful to our target audience, we create a lot of interesting content around the central brand thought that we create for the brands. So, the biggest shift is content. And the next biggest shift is localised or regional content coupled with performance marketing that truly performs”. Over the 22 years of Origami, what has worked best for the brand is the trust bridge between the internal stakeholders, long term relationships with clients as well as their digital-first approach.

Ali also spoke about one of his memorable campaigns. “What comes into my mind is another builder’s launch, which we did. We went digital first in nature and roped in Danish Sait. We did an activation programme first in and around the area where the client’s properties were. And Danish went into that particular area, did a lot of social interactions, physical meet-ups, leading to a ground-level event. The campaign was called ‘Get a Life’.”

Speaking about the future of advertising and marketing, he said: “Automation bots and all of these AI tools and all of that is creating a lot of challenges for the services industry. But from a brand's perspective, one thing which is not going to change is the idea and story. The creative narrative with the idea of storytelling for brands is going to be critical. Finally, if we want to humanize the brand, the consumer as a human is also trying to associate with another brand as a human. So, the challenge for brands and the most important component for brands is to humanize them as much as possible, give it a personality, give it a character, and give it a spirit.

“The other thing is going to be personalization. Everybody wants brands to personalise to “I” or “me” as an individual. So, the challenge for brands is to shift into that particular mindset and make sure that they personalize for the consumer. So, technology has a big role to play there,” he noted.